Partitioning sequence in livecd installer (ubiquity)

Bug #164865 reported by harrydb
4
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
partman-target (Ubuntu)
Triaged
Medium
Unassigned
Hardy
Won't Fix
Medium
Unassigned

Bug Description

Binary package hint: ubiquity

The following applies when installing a fresh copy of ubuntu using manual partition selection where some partitions are not going to be formatted (for example /home partition). When the some partitions that is not to be formatted is recognised but not mountable (due to unclean unmount, etc.) other partitions that come first in the partition list, like the target root partition, might get formatted before the installer sees the other partition is not mountable. The installer than stops because an error occurs and might leave the system in an unbootable state (as the target root could be the same as the old root).

In my case this was resolved by running fsck manually, but i can imagine there are cases where this does not work.

To make this more robust I suggest the following:
- check if partitions that need no formatting can be mounted before formatting other partitions
- if this fails, ask to run fsck which might resolve it

When these both fail, the other partitions are not touched which might leave the system in a bootable state which would otherwise not be the case.

Maybe this can be a part of the 'hardy-ubiquity-reliability' blueprint for hardy:
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/hardy-ubiquity-reliability
---
Harry de Boer

Changed in ubiquity:
importance: Undecided → Medium
status: New → Confirmed
Changed in ubiquity:
status: Confirmed → Triaged
harrydb (harrydeboer)
description: updated
Revision history for this message
Colin Watson (cjwatson) wrote :

I agree with this.

The best place to do this, I think, would be in a check.d script in partman-target that calls all the mount.d scripts in the same sequence as finish.d/mount_partitions (which would involve splitting out a helper script) and has some kind of resolution system if that goes wrong.

Revision history for this message
Colin Watson (cjwatson) wrote :

Not for Hardy at this point (so Won't Fix for Hardy but still Triaged for mainline). I still think this will be a good idea to do, but it's not critical for 8.04.

Changed in partman-target:
status: Triaged → Won't Fix
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